Many Shia speak Farsi and are Persians, not Arabs. Sunni have many ethnicities within, from Kurds on. These ethnicities fight each other. There are also dark and light skinned groups among Arabs. Add religious variants like Sufi, Wahhabism, etc and you have a more complex group than Lott understands.

Pork gets Lott re-elected, not judgement. One of his favorite tactics is to shake down the US Navy for ships they neither want nor need, to be built in the Lott family shipyards in Mississippi, bringing lots of pork and contracts to the area. Cut off the pork and he will be in trouble.

There's research showing the lack of sidewalks and parks to be influential to obesity in the suburbs. The driving culture undermines activity. Things like riding bikes, rollerblading, etc for smaller kids really require a flat place with no cars- a sidewalk.

Instead of walking to school, we drive them for fear of predators and cars. We drive to play dates, etc. We have electronic toys that undermine movement. I saw a better study that directly linked excessive TV, computer, and video game playing to obesity.

Add the increase in high fructose corn syrup and trans fat (which require some vigilance to police) and you have higher incidences.

Some stay at home mom's kids are chubby. Some working moms kids are skinny. It has to do with combinations of these factors. This study does not establish a direct causal relationship between working and fat.

He was a cashier, not an accountant. He had no knowledge of the total revenues.

Non-threatening is not needed here. A good fence and buzzer system, manned by trained people, is what's needed. You notice they never shoot up inner city schools? That's because they have fearsome security to limit access.

It is true that we just will never anticipate the crazy. The last round of school shootings hurt the NRA and gave us limited assault weapons bans. Those expired a few years ago. It's time to rework them, and add mental health to the Brady system.

We also need to train teachers as first responders. Armed attackers have been repelled before. If close at hand attack and armed attack, if far away you flee. Remember that school where the boys and girls attacked the gunman in 1998? They startled him and took the gun away.

You have a few seconds to react because of surprise. That's where some training could help. We've been here before and gone through this before. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. There is a need for strong, accurate intervention based on research and previous incidents. We have that.

The pedophiles are getting more empowered. Between the chat rooms and the oversexualization of younger children in the media, there are police and psychologists who argue it is easier for pedophiles to find mainstream images that appear to "normalize" their urges today. There's a general atmosphere of over-entitlement for some people that also plays into it.

The encouragement of a "victim" mentality in men like these two shooters by pundits and info-tainment types is also a problem. It allows them to justify their behavior by blaming women for "causing" it. They want young girls so they can control them, get off on the control and humiliation, and because some of the sicker elements in our media have made younger and younger girls into sex objects. They can't differentiate between that fantasy and our reality.

It's been a while but I remember sleepwalking those first four weeks. This article as funny as hell. I also remember wondering why these women were telling me this NOW, when it was too late to back out. Uh, how about before I decided to make a lamprey (I call mine peanut).

All I can say is good friends make the whole thing easier. So does a sense of humor. I have no doubt that Ms. Havrilesky will be just fine.

First, the cashier gives no hard numbers for how many left and wanted money back. If it was widespread it would have been an accountant or manager, not a cashier, saying BBW lost money, followed by X number patrons wanted money back on X night and cost X, with lower liquor sales of X amount as compared to a usual night. Clearly that's not the nature of the email that the cashier sent. He perceived a loss, but was not backing it up with numbers or any sense of how the club actually made a profit. The accountant is conspicuous by the absense here.

It also has to do with drinks. Overpriced drinks are the biggest revenue stream, not the cover. If there was a shortfall in the amount of liquor profits, I'd believe him. Since that was not even mentioned, I think the cashier may have perceived something and not had the business sense or overall knowledge to put it in context.

If one or two guys leave, but the rest stay, or drink even more, the night is profitable. We don't know the margin that left, so we have no way of assessing whether the night was not profitable.

What a tempest in a teapot.

I was groped on the blue line once in the early 90s while standing. The guy grabbed my breast. At first I was shocked, then mad. I shoved him. He acted like I was strange! I also had a guy try to rub up against me. I moved, he tried to follow, and luckily some other men saw it and blocked him.

In terms of groping, I had more problems as a teen in New Orleans on the bus. I learned to carry oversize sharpened knitting needles. It's amazing what a deterrent those needles were to the gropers. Much better than pepper spray or anything else. No one could accuse me of aggression because I was a 14 year olf KNITTING on the bus. I rode Greyhound with those needles and with a big sharpened crochet hook, contently doing hand work.

I still knit and crochet.